In the war without end between the video card manufacturers, the leader
of the pack is determined as much by how many levels of the market they
can hit as it is by the manufacturer who can produce the fastest top
end card. ATI has always been good at this, many times managing to have
multiple versions of a particular core available at every performance
level and price point. However in this latest generation, they didn't
have a card to sit between their top end HD 4870 and the dual-GPU
equipped HD 4870X2. What's worse is that NVIDIA did.

Yes, the new Gigabyte 890FXA-UD5 gives you all the benefits of the 890FX chipset; but they have given the chipset a taste of Gigabyte's own medicine. The prescription prescribe would be the ability to unlock the extra cores on X3 and X4 Athlon II and Phenom II processors which is no longer present within the chipset but integrated in the motherboard via a hardware mounted IC. Another Gigabyte exclusive is the Ultra Durable 3 Technology which means that two ounces of copper is placed into each PCB better heat dissipation and better stability.